The trend in portable electronic devices is towards smaller physical sizes using wireless communications and multimedia processing. This requires increased computing power to supply the feature-rich functionality needed. Unfortunately, progress in battery power capacity is not growing as rapidly as these technologies require for their support. Therefore, intelligent power management in these applications is an important factor for successful implementations.
CMOS circuits often play a dominant role in these devices, which are usually integrated to the point of having a system on a chip (SoC). The power dissipated in CMOS circuits consists of two major components. One component is proportional to the product of supply voltages and their static currents provided. The other component is proportional to the product of the square of supply voltages, the capacitance being switched, a switching activity factor based on the probability of a particular operation and the frequency of operation.
Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling (DVFS) reduces one or more supply voltages while slowing the operating frequency to provide a quadratic reduction in energy consumption at the cost of increased operation time. The operation frequency can be adjusted dynamically to meet the minimum performance requirements of the application. Correspondingly, the operation voltage can also be adjusted dynamically to minimize wasted power consumption based on meeting the minimum performance requirements. These reductions are targeted to provide a “just-in-time” performance for the application.
The application of current voltage and frequency management techniques allows more efficient operation of electronic devices. However, improvements in power management techniques would prove beneficial in the art.